Early results and status of a research effort to frame the possibility in compressing the time scale of structural health
monitoring to the impulsive transient domain are presented. Output only modal methods using a frequency domain
decomposition technique are used to extract the operational modes of a plate subject to impulsive loading. A strain
energy method for plates is the used to detect the damage on the plate. The method detects damage, but the location of
damages is not very precise. The development of an extremely short duration, transient structural health monitoring
algorithm will be discussed. Challenges in studying this new domain of health monitoring will also be highlighted.